A top Linux kernel developer has dubbed Fedora 18 "the worst Red Hat distro" he has ever seen.

lan Cox, presently employed by Intel, has switched to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

Writing in his blog, Cox said that the Fedora 18 installer is unusable, the updater is buggy. The default desktop has been eviscerated to the point of being slightly less useful than a chocolate teapot, and instead of fixing the bugs in it they've added them.

"It can't even manage to write valid initrds for itself instead on one machine of simply bombing into a near undebuggable systemd error, " Cox complained.

He is not the only one. Comments on his blog include lots of users who had bad experiences, although not as bad as Cox's. One user said that the upgrade was painless once he worked out why Fedora 18 was breaking his install scripts. The installer does randomly fail and he did not like the fact that the new Red Hat did not have a CLI for network configuration.

Another said that while he was a huge supporter of Red Hat and Fedora, the latest release is a bit disappointing.

"Multiple items that worked great with F16 and F17 won't work with with this release, no matter how much time I put into trying to get them to work. I went back to Debian. I hope these issues are resolved soon so I can put Fedora back on this laptop," the user said.

Another user moaned that his complaints to Red Hat were not going anywhere.

"Filing a bug report seems to be useless. I've got mail from bugzilla some days ago regarding the EOL of F16 and "we're not fixing this"," the user moaned.